Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading

Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading PDF Author: Brian G. Caraher
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description

Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading

Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading PDF Author: Brian G. Caraher
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book

Book Description


Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading

Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading PDF Author: Brian G. Caraher
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271026244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A critical study of the interpretive problems surrounding readings of one of Wordsworth's best-known lyrics. Wordsworth's "Slumber" and the Problematics of Reading engages in detail both the nature and the implications of what can be called literary pragmatics. It offers a new interpretation of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal" as well as "Strange fits of passion" and "She dwelt among untrodden ways," making a major contribution to an ongoing interpretive debate concerning the first poem and the theoretical issues to which is gives rise. It also provides new ways to contextualize Wordsworth's so-called Lucy poems as well as Coleridge's appropriations of them in 1799. Caraher analyzes solipsism and strange fantasies of death as they surface in readings of Wordsworth's lyric and provides critical examinations of the rhetoric, assumptions, and evidences of reading on the part of many of Wordsworth's most famous critics. He then makes a strong case for the theoretical viability of the work of John Dewey and Stephen Pepper for the field of literary studies, especially for theories of literary reading, theories of evidence, and the logic of literary inquiry. Caraher's identification of the "problematic" of Wordsworth's poem gives direction to a powerful inquiry into the poem's meanings, its reader's judgments, and its culture's pathologies. He makes a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning pragmatism in literary studies and to the understanding of Wordsworth and the theory of reading.

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847603459
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Reading the Written Image

Reading the Written Image PDF Author: Christopher Collins
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271007632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The &"willing suspension of disbelief,&" which Coleridge said &"constitutes poetic faith,&" therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated. Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written image: poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.

Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism

Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism PDF Author: Don H. Bialostosky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521412490
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for teaching. Bialostosky draws on the work of Bakhtin and his followers to create a 'dialogic' critical synthesis of what Wordsworth's readers - from Coleridge to de Man - have made of his poetry. He reveals Wordsworth's poetry as itself 'dialogically' responding to its various contexts, and opens up fruitful possibilities for criticism and teaching of Wordsworth. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.

Theory at Yale

Theory at Yale PDF Author: Marc Redfield
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823268683
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book examines the affinity between “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with “Yale.” The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man’s work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify “theory.” Combining a broad account of the “Yale Critics” phenomenon with a series of careful reexaminations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language’s unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman’s representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom’s early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory’s influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature’s increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey’s paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, paintings that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory-as-deconstruction in America.

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth PDF Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth provides a wide-ranging account of one of the most famous Romantic poets. Specially commissioned essays cover all the important aspects of this multi-faceted writer; the volume examines his poetic achievement with a chapter on poetic craft, while other chapters focus on the origin of his poetry and on the challenges it presented and continues to present. Further contributions include discussions of The Prelude and The Recluse, Wordsworth as philosophic poet, his writing in relation to European Romanticism, and Wordsworth as Nature poet. The collection, by an international team of established specialists concludes with a lucid account of the history of Wordsworth's texts, and offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading.The volume aims to ensure that its readers will be grounded in the history of Wordsworth's career and his critical reception.

Wordsworth and Feeling

Wordsworth and Feeling PDF Author: G. Kim Blank
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838636008
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Wordsworth and Feeling returns to Wordsworth's personal history in order to locate and contextualize some of the most remarkable poetry in the English language. In this study, G. Kim Blank details how this poetry evolves out of Wordsworth's radical subjectivity, but the most pressing feature of that subjectivity is the cluster of subjects - loss, guilt, suffering, endurance, death - which appears throughout much of his poetry up until 1802-4.

Paradigms of Reading

Paradigms of Reading PDF Author: I. MacKenzie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230503985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Linguistic signs do not coincide with intended or interpreted meanings. For relevance theory, this theoretical commonplace merely demonstrates the inferential nature of language. For Paul de Man, on the contrary, it suggested that language is unstable, random, arbitrary, mechanical, ironic and inhuman. This book seeks to show that relevance theory is a more plausible account of communication, cognition and literary interpretation than the deconstructionist theory de Man elaborated from readings of Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche.

William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation

William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation PDF Author: David P. Haney
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description